Bitcoin Faucets become the new entry points for Bitcoin in developing countries

Bitcoin Faucet WordPress plugin is now powering more than 200 Bitcoin sites around the world, allowing more than 2.5 billion unbanked adults from around the world to participate in a permissionless global economy.

The original Bitcoin faucet, created by Gavin Andresen, was a way for new users to experience Bitcoin for free. Today these Bitcoin faucets are still around, only they have changed their purpose from helping people to getting started with Bitcoin into generating revenue through ads for the webmasters that run them.

However, even though most, if not all faucets, are built for the purpose of generating revenues they still serve their function as entry points to the Bitcoin universe. Many individuals from around the world, where the average salary is around $1.5 a day, find a secondary income stream in these faucets. The average income for using today’s faucets is around $0.11/day.

While the community usually refers to faucet payouts as spam transactions that congest network traffic, Ofir Beigel the owner of 99Bitcoins, one of the largest faucets operating today thinks differently:

“There’s no such thing as a spam transaction. If a faucet owner pays enough fees to get their transactions sent through the network, as small as they maybe, these are valid transactions. I think a lot of people tend to overlook countries like Nigeria and Ukraine because they have a “bad rep” online. Personally, I see this as a great way to get people who actually need Bitcoin in their life started with it. If they want to use a faucet they need to learn how to get a Bitcoin wallet, a Bitcoin address, how transactions work and a lot more stuff that people are usually too lazy to learn. In this case they have a great incentive to learn - they get paid for it”.

Seeing the success of its own faucet 99Bitcoins created a Bitcoin Faucet WordPress plugin that allows any WordPress site on the web to start a faucet instantly. Over 200 sites have started to run faucets since the plugin came out a few months ago and the number is increasing every day.